Business owners use websites to create a relationship with their target customers and to build brand identity and product awareness. Increasing competition to draw the customers’ attention compels business owners and the designers to come out with unique website designs. The emphasis is on designing the user-friendly sites. New website design trends are emerging every year to compete for the customers’ or users’ attention.

Website design has evolved so much that the designers have discarded the old and traditional ways completely. In fact, web designers such as Eric Meyr have stopped calling themselves as web designers and rather wish to be known as an ‘’experience designer’’. The web design technique is no more just about making a website look good to the audience. It is now more about creating an experience for the users.

New changes in website designs have already taken place in the current year. Here are some of the key website design trends that we are already witnessing in 2017.

Making UI more conversational

Massive changes in how people are contacting and conveying message have taken place already. One of the key changes is that people use messaging platforms more than the conventional social networks and app downloads. For example, messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Slack are emerging hot favorite means for chatting.

Taking note of this change, websites too now have conversational interfaces that allow people to interact with companies, services and bots. Such websites are providing the platform to chat and send messages. In 2017, this trend is in its initial phase but it is going to shape up the future of web design in the coming years.

GIF going mainstream

Many websites and apps use animations to attract the visitors to their products or services. But use of GIFs is gaining momentum in the current year. GIFs are in fact everywhere and built even into Twitter and Facebook. The web designer experts opine that GIFs can be used for website design as well to draw the users’ attention.

Website designers have started using GIFs to provide guidance on how to use a product and explain a workflow. The animation provides a rich product experience to the users. Web designers can use tools such as Giphy, Photoshop to create GIF.

Responsive design taken to the next level

In April 2016, Google made a revolutionary change in its ranking algorithm. It started ranking up the websites that optimize their content regularly. This change by the major search engine will result in more entrepreneurs making changes in their websites to achieve higher Google search ranks.

So, the responsive website design will go to the next level in 2017 due to the new ranking algorithm. More website designs will become a lot more flexible so that it can be accessible to the different devices.

Minimalism will continue to dominate

Minimalism as a design trend has been around for quite some time and it will continue to dictate the terms of website design. In their pursuit to make more information accessible from one point, the designers are creating ultra-minimalistic multiple cards. These cards virtually represent a topic and they are enticing enough for users to click.

The designers will use the minimalism even for navigation and menus to keep these features as simple as they can. The users like simple and de-cluttered websites with easy navigational features that can visually explain a topic.

Use of authentic photos

Web sites had stock-photos once stuffed everywhere. That is not the case anymore. Business owners now create websites to build a convincing brand image. They put authentic photos of their company officials, workers, products and events on their websites rather than taking resort in casual stock photos. In fact, the web designers will prefer using no photos if stock photos are the only option. In 2017, websites will have professionally captured authentic photos with an artistic touch to put a face to a brand.

Bottomless long-scrolling websites

Long-scrolling websites are convenient for users as they can scan entire information from one page by stretching the site page downwards. They can constantly see new information without clicking away to the new pages. Social sites like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook already have long-scrolling pages with no bottom.

Now, many business owners are creating bottomless long-scrolling pages for the convenience of the users. Taking this trend further, now the designers are doing away with tabs and menus. They are replacing these buttons by creating a long page and putting every visual and text based information on it to give users a unique experience. To break the monotony of the design, such pages have multiple images, different typography and even videos.

Use of eye-catching big typography

Big typography catches attention of the website visitors immediately and conveys a message profoundly. With big letters spread across the web page, the visitors cannot escape from noticing a core brand message from the business owner.

IMAGE Source: victoryjournal.com

Use of big letters had been already prevalent in 2016, but in the current year the sites will have the typography on full screen. The letters will also be seen designed in dynamic colors and textures. To amaze the users, the designers will incorporate vibrant fonts. The large letters may also be a web design tool to break up the grids when designing a long scrolling page.

Clutter-free Simple Homepages

Clean and simple homepages delivers a brand message to the audience in a forceful way. In 2017, a major web design trend will be that the designers will free the homepages from many letters and other clutters such as the number of buttons. The emphasis will be to get rid of the type heavy homepage styles and move to keep only one a word or two on a website’s first screen page.

Such a typical homepage has an image dominating the first frame of the screen. These pages then have a lot of relevant information below the scroll. This design aims at packing the information on the scroll and delivering the core message immediately from the first top screen using an image.

Navigational styles based on user patterns

Navigation styles have undergone many changes over the years. In 2017, the designers will create these buttons after considering the changing user patterns. The previous pop-out styles, hidden buttons and placing the buttons at the side or bottom are older styles. Now the designers are studying the users’ habits when they use mobile phones to navigate.

Illustration

More companies are turning to illustrators and graphic artists to create bespoke illustrations for their websites. After years of flat design and minimalism, adding illustrated touches to your site is a great way to inject a little personality, as seen in this charming example from NewActon (designed by Australian digital agency ED).

Wrapping it up.

Whilst we think everything on this list is pretty great, don’t try and fit every single one of these trends into your new website.

Some will work for some companies, others won’t. Pick and choose which styles and capabilities your client both needs and wants. Trying to do too much will instantly decrease the UX of your website. So be selective, be careful, and, most importantly, be creative.

Visitors can just leave your site within a span of a minute if they feel bored and dissatisfied with what you provide to them. It’s not also practical for you to just wait for another visitors and prospects to recognize and fully use your site in its optimum level. One advice here would be to make personalization that provides relevant content to the users, making them interested and engaged prospects. Fortunately, the tools that you need to make this possible are already available. The only thing to do is to personalize your content based on the user’s preferences, needs and wants. If you always experience being left out, there is probably something wrong with your site and here are some of the major reasons that can explain why:

You Give Your Customers Broad and Unspecified Advertisements

Too many advertisements can become an annoyance for your web users especially if these ads are irrelevant to their wants and needs. This creates a negative user experience. If you are still new to the work field, at least you have to monitor and be very cautious in your advertising messages. However, it is also impractical to remove the ads that greatly benefit your revenue. So, what would you do? The most effective way to fix this problem is to personalize you advertisements to every user that visits your site. Personalize them in a way that they target each individual differently, making the advertisements less annoying and more interesting to explore. Modern CMS solutions help web authors design and structure their rules that make personalizing ads much easier. The ads are automatically personalized based on the site visitor/user’s preferences which are taken form his/her past site history and profile information. Through this information, ads that suit the user’s wants and needs are then shown to him/her. It’s alright to add advertisements for extra revenue. However, remember that you have to provide interesting content with relevant ads that will make the user experience better and effective

You Provide Too much Irrelevant Content

Be straightforward. Do not provide unnecessary content for your users because it might bore them. Too much information and content can also redirect you from your goal of providing your users an effective and efficient user experience. For instance, Google’s search interface and algorithm are known to be very efficient. In results, Google’s search engine is considered to be the most used because it was simple and plain straightforward, on point and quickly provides relevant information to users. Your content must provide better or at least the same value. With appropriate way of handling and with the help of modern technology, your personalized content can also be like that of Google.

You have Out-of-Date Content

If providing your users with irrelevant content results in annoyance, providing them with outdated and/or undesirable content will surely make users withdraw from your service. Being high-tech means that you have to provide updated sites with updated tools. This can reflect your ownership as “committed to customers” and the quality you provide. If you want to attract more customers, make sure you make your content as updated as possible.

Your Lead Generation Tactics are too Obvious and Blatant

We always talk about content because basically, it is the most important element to consider for any business. What to do then? Make your web visitors see this value. A “lead form” from leads (potential sales contacts) can make your customers feel intimidated. Most of the visitors on web want to be private and do not want to share personal information. However, you can have both advantage of not being too aggressive and still be able to entertain leads on your site. This can be achieved by having fully-automated tools that make your lead forms not so aggressive but also make them more visible. With this, your leads are gained quickly without compromising visitor’s comfort.

Your Content is just Passive and Less Enticing

One of the ways to avoid being “Passive” and not remarkable is to provide an “exit extent offer”. It basically means that every time a user attempts to leave your site, provide your prospects with valuable and relevant content which will rivet your customer’s attention, enough to make them go back and visit the page again. Formulate strategies that you can apply on your content before they exit your site. In this way, they will consider to visit again. This strategy is proven to be effective which can make a huge impact on your overall conversion of leads.

This post will help you either as a graphic or web designer and considering switching to WordPress. These are the five (5) tips for you.

Decide if you can handle PHP code

If you are WordPress designer, come to think with it if you’re ready in handling PHP code after learning some PHP. Learning to code is what mostly designers do but if you do hate code, you don’t have to force yourself to do that.

Be familiar with the structure of a WordPress Theme and the way WordPress functions

This is the next step, to be familiar with structure and functions of WordPress in general. If ever, there’s a nice and easy introduction to the internal of a WordPress theme and you can check it out this.

Check the WordPress-specific CSS

Assuming that you are a web designer, then you should know some wherein that CSS you know from static sites is the same you’ll use with WordPress. There are also drag and drop frameworks if you think that CSS is too much for you.

Examine the internals of existing themes

As recommended, go to the official WordPress Theme Directory and download a bunch of popular themes. Install and test them and later you can start dissecting and learning it.

Read a lot about WordPress

WordPress is not constant and it is ever changing from time to time specifically with the versions, plugins, and themes. So, you need to read a lot for you to stay on top of it.

Jerry Bates, volunteer moderator for WordPress.tv, says one of the goals for 2016 is to update the site to better showcase content from WordCamps around the world. Oleg Belousov suggests WordPress.Tv have a playlist feature so viewers can favourite videos. He would also like to see having the videos saved to his WordPress.org profile. He noticed that a lot of links to presentation slides point to the speaker’s personal site. WordPress.tv should host presentation slides to protect against link rot and expiring domains.

If you have any additional ideas to improve WordPress.tv or feature request, you can visit here for more details.

Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web’s population is still running on good old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you’re designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website.

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.

You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.

If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the “quality” of the JPEG image—normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image’s file size.

On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format—the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!